Are these journalists simply illiterate? Do they lack the reading comprehension skills necessary to understand what James Damore wrote? Or is it rather the case, as I believe, that feminist gender theory has attained the status of an official religion within academia and journalism, so that skeptics are excluded from employment in these fields? If all your professors are committed to Third Wave feminist ideology — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — and all your college-educated peers went through the same indoctrination program, wouldn’t you just assume that these beliefs were scientific truth? And this is the situation within the elite media establishment, which is effectively off-limits to anyone who suspects that there are natural differences between men and women.

This ideological echo-chamber effect is the result of deliberate discrimination against conservatives in academia and media. We have witnessed how the American higher education system has ceded control to those who act as Stalinist commissars in enforcing political conformity. In 2005, then-Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that “innate differences” between men and women might explain the relative scarcity of women among science and engineering faculty. Summers, a liberal economist who had served in the Clinton administration, merely offered “innate differences” as one possible explanation of this disparity, but this was enough to summon a firestorm of rage from campus feminists. Within a year, Summers was forced to resign, sacrificed to the Feminist Cult of Androgyny as a warning to anyone within academia who might ever dare to imply that men and women are different.

Harvard feminist mob protesting against Larry Summers in 2005.

Totalitarian regimes do not tolerate dissent, and feminist hegemony in higher education has had the effect of disseminating this totalitarian attitude throughout those fields where college education is a prerequisite to employment, including tech companies like Google.

What happened to James Damore is a repetition not only of what happened to Larry Summers, but also what happened to Charles Murray after the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994. Murray (and his co-author, Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein, who unfortunately died of cancer just as the book went to press) were smeared as proponents of eugenics and neo-Nazi pseudo-science. Why? Because in documenting the socio-economic effects of differences in IQ, they highlighted the persistence of a ~15-point average difference in black/white IQ scores. Note the emphasis on the word “average.”

As a matter of public policy, liberals have no problem classifying people as members of groups (race, sex, nationality, religion, etc.) and calling attention to differences in socio-economic conditions between these groups. Liberals are constantly talking about these subjects, e.g., the “gender gap” in wages, or problems of poverty and crime in the black community, and proposing taxpayer-funded government “solutions” to statistical disparities between groups. What Murray and Herrnstein did in The Bell Curve was to examine the influence of intelligence in socio-economic “class structure.” Because of the widespread use of standardized testing since World War II, and the availability of financial aid to help low-income students attend college, Murray and Herrnstein showed, there has been a process of “cognitive partitioning” at work in American society for more than half a century.

To me, this was the most important revelation of The Bell Curve, and directly relevant to my personal experience. As a “gifted” student who rebelled against the public school regime and became a teenage dopehead, I had evaded the screening mechanisms that channel bright kids toward elite universities. Barely scraping through to get my high-school diploma, I never took the SAT, and enrolled at Jacksonville (Ala.) State University which at that time had an open-admissions policy. When I later took the ACT (required to enter JSU’s teacher-training program, which I considered as a career “fallback”) my junior year, I went to pick up my results at the registrar’s office and the staffer said: “Wow! With this score, you would have qualified for an honors scholarship.”

Getting “off-track” as a teenage dopehead had long-term consequences in my life, and in the lives of some of my hoodlum buddies who were likewise “gifted” underachievers. Those of my nerdy friends who managed to avoid the hoodlum lifestyle (or who, at least, didn’t go as far into teenage rebellion as I did) went off to Emory University or Berry College, and I even had one classmate who went to MIT. Meanwhile, I scrambled from job to job after college, and played in rock-and-roll bands, before finally getting into a journalism career at age 26. This experience gave me a sort of outsider perspective on “elite” culture that never really came into focus until I read The Bell Curve, where the first four chapters (pp. 29-115) are about “The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite” — and this has nothing to do with racial differences at all!

Take it from an ex-“gifted” student: Public education is the problem.

The system is fundamentally corrupt, a fact I recognized by age 12, but didn’t fully understand until I read The Bell Curve in my mid-30s.

Well, if you ever want to hear an hour-long sermon on what’s wrong with American public schools (namely everything), just ask me sometime. What is relevant to the subject of James Damore’s Google manifesto, however, is the way the smears against Damore replicate the way the media smeared Charles Murray more than 20 years ago. In addressing racial disparities in IQ — the so-called “test score gap” — Murray and Herrnstein repeatedly emphasize that this is about average group differences, and that the kind of statistics under discussion have no predictive value for any individual, no matter what his or her race.

Average group differences don’t tell us anything about whether a particular Chinese or Jewish or Mexican kid might become an engineer or an economist. However, these differences do matter when — as liberals habitually do — people start discussing socio-economic disparities as a problem in need of government policy solutions at taxpayer expense. America has erected a vast bureaucratic and legal establishment to enforce “equal opportunity” and “civil rights” that, in practice, involves a quota mentality in which statistical differences are interpreted as evidence of discrimination. This legal regime in turn provides lucrative opportunities for “diversity” consultants and creates phony jobs for people whose primary institutional role is to serve as representative tokens, e.g., Native American “woman of color” Elizabeth Warren.

BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKING SYSTEM TO THE GROUND!

Excuse my strong language, but that’s the dopehead hoodlum “smart take” on James Damore’s Google manifesto. Just once, when a Black Lives Matter protest turns into a race riot, I wish that instead of burning and looting private businesses, the urban mob would turn its anarchist fury against the local Board of Education or the teachers union.

Public schools are a scam run by the mediocre, for the mediocre. If you want to understand how thoroughly corrupt the system is, just research the percentage of public school teachers who send their own children to private schools. The perpetrators of the dishonest swindle that is American public education know damned well that the system is broken, and one of the ways they conceal this truth from the taxpaying public is by the make-believe charade of Equality and Diversity.

Repeatedly, there have been scandals of public school administrators faking standardized test results to maintain the fiction of Equality, as if every graduate of every high school in America was capable of doing college-level academic work. Because this myth of Equality is so vital to keep taxpayer money pumping into the corrupt education system, and because the Democrat Party is strongly allied with the teachers unions, every liberal in America is required to help promote the Equality myth which, at the collegiate level, takes the form of the Diversity myth. The alleged value of Diversity has been turned into an excuse for discrimination in admissions at elite universities, and has called into existence an enormous administrative bureaucracy to help maintain a Potemkin village illusion that the Gender Studies major at Harvard (or Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, etc.) is getting an education as demanding and as valuable as the student majoring in engineering or economics. Equality and Diversity are the slogans of a racket, a hustle, a three-card monte game that plays parents and taxpayers for chumps.

Oh, you can learn a few things as a teenage dopehead hoodlum that they don’t teach at Harvard, and one of them is how to spot a scam. Somehow, despite his Harvard education, James Damore managed to learn a few facts about biological differences between men and women, and also became aware of how the poisonous myth of Equality and Diversity has taken root in high-tech companies like Google, to the detriment of everyone except the kind of quota hustlers and ideological commissars who are employed to enforce conformity to this mythology.

The price Google pays for hiring extremely smart, well-read people: Some of them cut through the bullshit. https://t.co/B75YGNnMvZ

When it is necessary to describe natural differences between men and women, as James Damore did in his instantly legendary memo, it is important to remember that we are talking about average group differences — the same point Murray and Herrnstein emphasized in The Bell Curve. The range of variation is such that to say, for instance, that “males have greater mathematical ability than females” (on average) doesn’t mean that every boy is destined to become a math whiz, or that women are doomed to fail in careers where mathematical aptitude is crucial. What average group differences do mean, however, is that when liberals start whining about a “gender gap” in STEM fields (as they have been doing for the past 15 years or so), they are describing a problem that is not necessarily a problem, and for which we are unlikely to find a solution, no matter how much legislation is enacted or how many lawsuits are filed. It is especially foolish to expect “solutions” to such (alleged) problems from the public school system, except in the form of indoctrination in the make-believe Potemkin village games by which the education establishment conceals its own failures.

The journalistic establishment has, as a result of the cognitive partitioning described in The Bell Curve, become hostage to the prejudices of the educational establishment. If the Best and Brightest students are all channeled into a comparative handful of elite universities, and if major media organizations look to these universities when hiring journalists, it is no surprise that most people in the news industry share the biases of elite university faculty. (A recent study of faculty voter registration found that, in departments of journalism and communications at 40 leading universities, Democrat professors outnumber Republicans 20-to-1.) So when journalists falsely smear James Damore, in the same way Charles Murray has been smeared for more than 20 years, we can see the very deep problem of bias produced by the symbiotic relationship between academia and media.